In a move full of cryptic irony, users of Amazon.com’s popular e-book reader Kindle discovered yesterday that Amazon tapped into their devices without their knowledge or permission and wiped their devices clean of the digital versions of George Orwell’s famous novels of government corruption and thuggery, “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Though Amazon refunded the cost of the books and erased them at the publisher’s request, the online retailer was lambasted in message boards yesterday.

“I wonder if Amazon will send representatives to customers’ houses to retrieve dead-tree copies,” mused an Amazon customer called “Caffeine Queen” on the company’s Web site.

Another poster who goes by the handle “flipoid” likened Amazon’s draconian move to a “publisher coming to our houses to retrieve copies of now out-of-print books .”

“To me, the more logical solution would be to allow people who have paid for a book to keep it,” wrote flipoid. “If a publisher asks Amazon to remove the Kindle edition later, those people who purchased it in good faith should be able to keep it. Just don’t have it available for a future purchase if the publisher/author decides to pull it and it was a legal copy to begin with.”

A statement from Amazon explained: “These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”